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Innovation’s Fundamentals Shine Light on Unusual Opportunity

The feasibility of articulating a framework of Innovation’s fundamentals matters because of the associated opportunity for learning leverage.
This was the basis for Jerome Bruner’s conceptualization of “structures of the discipline” and for Peter Drucker’s argument that “organizing principles” allow for converting a skilled craft to a discipline or methodology by making it “broadly teachable.”

And the provisional version of Innovation’s fundamentals, presented at this website’s Opportunity page, shines light on the opportunity for an unusual quality of learning leverage:

  • In particular, these fundamentals reveal a leverage point of “embedded personalized guidance,” described in context below, which means that Innovation instruction may include structured support for broad student access to discovery of the following two experiences valued “for its sake alone”:

    • “Meaning” – Connection to a “purpose” that is larger than oneself and personally compelling
    • “Engagement” – Of one’s signature strengths, as a personal medium of expression.

  • The two experiences belong to a set of only five experiences “valued for its sake alone,” based on “well-being” theory. Also, national-level research about the value of purpose for students has associated purpose with an intrinsic force for learning.

  • The more that Innovation instruction can bring forward these two fundamental experiences of Innovation’s practice, the more likely it seems that learning can take hold.

  • It seems serendipitous that the student experience of learning about Innovation’s change catalyst of value may include its own value of support for change in student lives, and in turn the societal change of workforce capability. Embedded personalized guidance may represent the secret sauce of Innovation instruction.


Three Accumulating Levels of Learning Leverage

The overall opportunity for learning leverage can be viewed in terms of three accumulating levels:

  • Level 1 – Leverage from articulating Innovation’s fundamentals
  • Level 2 – Leverage points within Innovation’s particular fundamentals — complementary & mutually-reinforcing
  • Level 3 – Leverage from an “Innovation learning system,” as a complement to the existing system for Science.

Level 1: Leverage from articulating Innovation’s fundamentals

A framework of fundamentals, spelling out Innovation’s unifying constants that span widely varying innovation examples, facilitates a new way of seeing Innovation in the world. Overall, students can begin to recognize Innovation’s overall purpose and methods as a particular category of creativity — one that “integrates and applies” knowledge within two unique types of hypotheses, to produce new value in the form of an offering, which catalyzes the societal benefits of resource leverage if customers adopt the new value.

As Bruner described with the example of Algebra, articulating the subject’s unifying concepts allows students to see that every Algebra problem is “but a variation” on a small set of themes. For Innovation, this perspective includes seeing how much and in what ways innovation does vary, including highlighting primary types of variation and more.

However, unlike Algebra’s ready supply of varied problems, there is not a ready supply of Innovation’s varied examples for use within instruction. This gap represents a non-trivial limiter to learning leverage:

  • On one hand, it’s important to recognize this gap as limiter. For example, cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham has argued: “The surest way to help students understand an abstraction is to expose them to many different versions of the abstraction.” A plentiful supply of intentional offering examples can enhance the lens afforded by a framework of fundamentals.

  • However, this limiter can be addressed. Filling the gap by generating a bank of pertinent examples could be as simple as establishing a number of offering examples, or it could be as ambitious as developing a new learning tool such as the one sketched at this website: a searchable online gallery of innovation examples.

Bruner held too that articulating structures of a discipline offers several other learning benefits:

  • Structures represent “a minimum requirement for using knowledge, for bringing it to bear on problems and events one encounters.”
  • “Permit many other things to be related to the discipline meaningfully.”
  • Provide support for taking in “an enormous amount of information,” akin to the cognitive science notion of “chunking.”
  • And: “To be in command requires a continual deepening of one’s understanding of (the subject’s structures) that comes from learning to use them in progressively complex forms.”

To note just a few of the “other things” that can be related to Innovation meaningfully, aside from Science and Invention, which share with Innovation the essential creative structure of hypotheses, consider:

  • Innovation is said to represent “the knowledge base of entrepreneurship.”
  • Innovation’s practice situates artificial intelligence (AI). Like all existing technology, AI can provide a resource that an offering incorporates.
  • Innovation is amoral. It calls for “responsible” innovation.
  • The framework of Innovation’s fundamentals situates an array of existing Innovation models and tools, which can be used more discerningly and nimbly with the perspective of this context.
  • The framework of Innovation’s fundamentals contextualizes schooling’s academic disciplines. This includes the argument that Humanities study may support fruitful innovation hypotheses.


Level 2: Leverage points associated with Innovation’s particular fundamentals

Unpacking Innovation’s framework of fundamentals, at least according to the provisional framework, can shine light on three complementary and mutually-reinforcing learning leverage points:

  • Intelligibility
  • Engagement
  • Embedded Personalized Guidance

Intelligibility:
Although Intelligibility refers basically to the lens for “taking in” the unifying concepts and the many benefits elaborated in Level 1, its inclusion here is to highlight potential for “Intelligibility” to interact productively with the two other leverage points: “Engagement” with Innovation’s practice and “Personalized” learning.

As one example, Intelligibility can inspire. It can help students reflect on the types of change that would interest them and/or the way they could see themselves engaging with innovation’s methods. The reflection can begin early, in small but meaningful ways (e.g., select and unpack a favorite innovation example).

As Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and colleagues have noted:

“Humans can observe and/or be shown how activities of humans have changed the environment, fostering realization that other people may be able to also bring about change … A sense of what has been done helps lead to a sense of what might be done as well as an appreciation for the kinds of established constraints that might affect imagined changes.”

Similarly, the Kauffman Foundation’s Panel on Entrepreneurship Curriculum in Higher Education described the benefit of maturing intelligibility in distinguishing examples of excellence, drawing on an analogy with music:

“Departments of music composition cannot make students creative. But studying how great music is made can ignite whatever creativity students possess and help bring it to expression. The aim of studying composition is to unpack works of genius and excellence and thereby lead students beyond imitation to originality. … Making innovation intelligible may help students to imagine and engage in entrepreneurial activities they otherwise might not have considered.”


Engagement:
The provisional framework of Innovation’s fundamentals reveals at least three aspects of Innovation that might facilitate student engagement within a schooling context, including among young students. Combining all three engagement facilitators might work especially well:

  • The power of small — linked to Peter Drucker’s argument that innovation pertains to “all human activities except those that might be called ‘existential’ rather than social.” Similarly, John Seely Brown points to students learning best “when they are able to operate within the constraints of a bounded environment.”
  • Hypotheses as a familiar on-ramp — as a way to demystify the origins of ideas, along with the familiar subject of offering new value.
  • The power of personal interest — including Seely Brown’s argument that “the passion of the learner is the greatest source of inspiration but also the largest reservoir of tacit knowledge,” and “(tacit understanding) relates most deeply to the associations and connections among various pieces of knowledge.”

Even better, these three engagement facilitators support scaffolding hands-on practice with Innovation’s purpose and methods. See detailed examples of scaffolding, including use of existing Innovation models and tools, within this document about the overall opportunity for learning leverage.

Even as student initiatives at the scale of a classroom or school community may not be labeled “Innovation,” they would fit legitimately with innovation’s purpose and methods. Moreover, at any scale, students’ achievement of change by way of value and experiences with leverage can leave a significant impression.


Embedded Personalized Guidance:
As the leverage point of Intelligibility supports understanding Innovation’s unifying concepts and the nature of its extensive variation, and Engagement supports experience-based learning, the combination can facilitate consciousness and development of personal connection to purpose and strengths engagement by posing questions such as: What types of change in the world do I think matter most? Which am I drawn to? In what contexts can I imagine myself being “inner-driven and other-focused”? What types of value would I like to see put out into the world? What types of change? How can I best participate in creating that value, as a catalyst for change?

William Damon, who has provided a leading voice in youth-focused research regarding purpose and its effects, including research with a nationally representative sample of U.S. high school students, notes that this personalized sense of direction “is not necessarily career, but it’s deeper than grades and awards.” It speaks to the “why” of schooling. “[Purpose] speaks to an ultimate concern, larger than the self, a deeper reason for immediate goals and behavior. It speaks intrinsically to:

  • Why am I doing this?
  • What does it matter?
  • Why is it important?”

Consonant with the theory of well-being, Damon argues: “The disposition toward purpose has been bred into (humans) … There’s a universal yearning for the meaning of a sense of positive, forward direction.”

Damon argues that “anyone can find purpose and pursue it with rich benefit to themselves” and that it “has been a good deal harder than it should be.”

Damon identified twelve steps that have characterized a common discovery process among youth who have connected with a compelling personal purpose (20% incidence in his research). And there is a natural resemblance between these steps and fundamentals-based Innovation instruction.


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With time and intentional use of a framework of Innovation’s fundamentals the combination of these three leverage points may serve to train the student eye, cultivate innovation consciousness and its day-to-day impetus, develop discerning imagination associated with pertinent knowledge, facilitate discovery of personal purpose and signature strengths, and more.



Level 3: An Innovation Learning System

The feasibility of articulating a framework of Innovation’s fundamentals presents the opportunity for high-leverage learning at any scale – as limited as one individual or one classroom.

However, the greatest opportunity for leverage would almost certainly result from an Innovation Learning System as a complement to the existing learning system for methods of Science/Research (e.g., K-12 or K-16):

  • The benefits of broad student access to deepening understanding about Innovation and its methods, including access to an embedded structure of support for exploring a personal sense of direction, seems especially important given that Innovation’s methodology is broadly pertinent as a modifier of the vast majority of 21st century workforce roles.

  • Moreover, as a methodology that’s cross-functional and cross-disciplinary, shared roots of understanding are especially valuable. Shared understanding and language could support individuals in nimbly “plugging into” innovation’s instruction and practice across time and place, in effect establishing a “modular interface.”

  • An Innovation Learning System could facilitate the harnessing of the mutually-reinforcing leverage points discussed at Level 2. Such a learning system would be naturally aligned with converting Innovation from “a skilled craft to a discipline or methodology.” It might pose significant potential for both personal (student) and societal benefit.

The opportunity for an Innovation Learning System might even be viewed as a response to John W. Gardner’s early voice. In a book about “the individual and the innovative society,” Gardner framed innovation’s instructional challenge and opportunities in a way that remains pertinent over fifty years later. Consider these sample seeds from that work:

“The classic question of [societal renewal] has been: How can we cure this or that specifiable ill? Now, another question: How can we design a system that will continuously reform (i.e., renew) itself, beginning with the present specifiable (ills) … (to the) ills (we) cannot foresee?” … “Like a scientist in a lab, part of enduring tradition/system …”

In the way that the scientific method has established an enduring tradition and system for over a century of broadly-accessible learning and practice toward the purpose of advancing what is known about our world, a framework of Innovation’s fundamentals, or organizing principles, might make feasible such a tradition and system for the 21st century’s urgently needed societal effects associated with Innovation’s function of resource leverage – especially with its responsible use.